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This Nov. 2013 file photo shows Schlitterbahn's new Verruckt speed slide/water coaster in Kansas City, Kan. A 10-year-old boy died Sunday on the Kansas water slide that is billed as the world's largest, according to officials. Kansas City, Kan., police spokesman Officer Cameron Morgan said the boy died at the Schlitterbahn Waterpark, which is located about 15 miles west of downtown Kansas City, Missouri. Schlitterbahn spokeswoman Winter Prosapio said the child died on one of the park's main attractions, Verruckt, a 168-foot-tall water slide that has 264 stairs leading to the top.
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Patty Davis, press secretary for the Consumer Product Safety Commission, said federal agencies have no jurisdiction to inspect or investigate stationary water parks.

“This is a fixed-site amusement park. We don’t have jurisdiction over that,” Davis said. “We only have jurisdiction over traveling sites.”

State regulations of water parks are guided by the Kansas Amusement Ride Act, which took effect in 2009. The law requires owners of amusement rides to conduct their own testing, post a certificate of inspection, retain inspection records and submit an annual itinerary to the Kansas Department of Labor.

Though KDOL has authority under the law to inspect amusement rides at random, there is no indication the state has inspected Verruckt in the two years since it opened.

Instead, Schlitterbahn was allowed to inspect its own rides to determine if they were safe.

An open records request for inspections at Schlitterbahn — filed by The Topeka Capital-Journal and answered by a KDOL attorney Monday morning — contains no state inspections of Verruckt. The only inspection reports provided by KDOL are from 2012, prior to Verruckt’s opening.

When a KDOL inspector visited the park in 2012, he was told by Schlitterbahn’s resident inspector that nondestructive testing — or NDT — data wasn’t available. Instead, the park was watching its rides to test their safety.

Since 2009, state law has required NDT testing for amusement rides in Kansas. As the Kansas Amusement Ride Act states, “No amusement ride shall be operated in this state unless nondestructive testing of the ride has been conducted.”

Montague’s inspection in the summer of 2012 is the last inspection KDOL conducted at Schlitterbahn, according to the state agency’s response to the open records request. Schlitterbahn is required to conduct daily inspections at the park but those inspections aren’t public records, according to KDOL staff attorney Heather Wilke.

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At first, Schlitterbahn required Verruckt riders to be 14 years old but that requirement was later dropped by Schlitterbahn’s owners, who believed it was unnecessary. Height and weight requirements were implemented instead.

The cause of Sunday’s accident is under investigation and the slide remains closed pending the results, as required by state law. If the water park’s operators are found to have violated the Kansas Amusement Ride Act by operating Verruckt without proper inspections, they could face misdemeanor charges, according to the state statute.